NASA report reveals disturbing discovery in Antarctica

After the Larsen C break, scientists focused their work on the Thwaites, one of the most difficult places to reach on Earth, but which is about to be better known than ever.

In 2010, NASA launched Operation IceBridge, a campaign to study the links between the polar regions and the global climate to measure the effects of climate change. Until then, the Thwaites Glacier was one of the most difficult places to reach on Earth. However, with the report recently released by the US Space Agency, it is about to be better known than ever.

Document, published on Wednesday, January 30 in the Science Advances magazine, shows that researchers are paying close attention to the gigantic cavity – about two-thirds of Manhattan's size and about 300 meters high – that grows in the Thwaites bottom located in the area west of West Antarctica.

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The researchers' findings suggest that it is necessary to look deeper into the lower Antarctic glaciers to calculate the rate at which sea level will rise as a result of climate change.

At first, the scientific team was expecting to find empty spaces at the bottom of the Thwaites, between the ice and the rock, allowing the ocean circulation to melt from below.

However, the size and explosive growth rate of the new hole surprised them, considering that it is big enough to contain 14 billion tonnes of ice. Especially because most of this ice cream has melted in the past three years.

In this regard, Professor Eric Rignot, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Said "For years, we suspected that Thwaites was not the only one in the world. was not well attached to the underlying rock and now, thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the details. "

The researcher added that the detected cavity had been revealed by an ice penetration radar in the IceBridge operation, in addition to data obtained from a constellation of radars with synthetic aperture of Italian and German spaceships.

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"These data from very high resolution they can be treated with the help of a technique called radar interferometry to reveal how the underlying soil surface has shifted between images, "he said.

It should be noted that the Thwaites Glacier is currently responsible for about 4% of the sea level rise in the world and that, if a complete fracture occurs and all the ice is lost, this level would increase. between 65 and 80 centimeters.

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Because of the real risks that exist, it is that the National Foundation The United States and the UK National Council for Environmental Research have decided to launch a five-year field project to measure long-term ice losses.

The problem is that there is currently no way to monitor Antarctic glaciers from ground level. They must therefore use data from aerial or satellite instruments to observe the changing characteristics of melting glaciers.

Another piece of information that scientists are watching is the ground connection of a glacier, which is the place near the edge of the continent where it rises and begins to float in the seawater.

Many Antarctic glaciers stretch for miles of its land lines, floating above the ocean and when this occurs, the land line folds inland, further exposing the bottom of a glacier to the water of sea, which increases the probability that the melting speed is accelerated.

Source: www.publimetro.cl